Where never shepherd fed his flock, Or careful peasant sow'd his grain? "No wholesome herb grows on the same, Or bird of day will on it rest; 'Tis barren as the hopeless flame, That scorches my tormented breast. "Deep underneath a cave does lie, Th' entrance hid with dismal yew, Where Phoebus never shew'd his eye, Or cheerful day yet pierced through. "In that dark melancholy cell (Retreat and solace of my woe), Love, sad despair, and I, do dwell, The springs from whence my grief do flow. "Sleep, which to others ease does prove, Comes unto me, als in vain ; For in my dreams I am in love, And in them too she does disdain." Mary Monk, daughter of Lord Molesworth, and wife of George Monk, Esq. (died 1715), was a delightful being, and thou wilt read, perhaps not with unmoistened eyes, my Dora-these words of the dedication to the Princess of Wales, of her poems, written after her death by her father. "Most of them are the product of the leisure hours of a young gentlewoman lately deceased; who, in a remote country retirement, without omitting the daily care due to a large family, not only perfectly acquired the several languages here made use of (Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French), but the good morals and principles contained in those books, so as to put them in practice, as well during her life and fanguishing sickness, as at the hour of her death; in short, she died not only like a Christian, but like a Roman lady, and so became at once the object of the grief and comfort of her relations." Of her poetry we have here two specimens--one a very noble trauslation from Felicaia on Providence the other, "Verses written on her death-bed at Bath to her husband in London." They are indeed most affecting. "Thou who dost all my worldly thoughts employ, Thou pleasing source of all my earthly joy, Thou tenderest husband and thou dearest friend, To thee this first this last adieu I send ! And will for ever veil me from thy sight; Th' eternal scenes of heaven he sets in view, And tells me that no other joys are true. But love, fond love, would yet resist his power, Would fain awhile defer the parting hour: He brings thy mourning image to my eyes, And would obstruct my journey to the skies. But say, thou dearest, thou unwearied friend! Say, should'st thou grieve to see my sorrows end? Thou know'st a painful pilgrimage I've past; And should'st thou grieve that rest is come at last? Rather rejoice to see me shake off life, And die as I have liv'd, thy faithful wife." Have not these "breathings," sincere and fervent, from breasts most pure, proved to your heart's content, that we were right in what we said above of poetry? These Three were Christian ladies-in high life, but humble in spirit-all accomplished in this world's adornments, but intent on Heaven. There is an odour, as of violets, while we press the pages to our lips. We never had in our hands the poems of Anne, Countess of Winchelsea, printed in 1713; but we well remember reading some of them in beautiful manuscript, many years ago, at Rydal Mount. Wordsworth has immortalized her in the following sentence" It is remarkable that, excepting a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, and some delightful pictures in the poems of Lady Winchelsea, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the Paradise Lost and the Seasons, does not contain a single new image of external nature." She was the daughter of Sir William Kingsmill of Sidmonton, in the county of Southampton, maid of honour to the Duchess of York, second wife of James II., and married Heneage, second son of Heneage, Earl of Winchelsea, to which title he succeeded on the death of his nephew. Mr Dyce has At length the conqueror death asserts his given three of her compositions, all exright, cellent-the Atheist and the Acorn Life's Progress-and a Nocturnal Reverie. In the last are some "of the delightful pictures" alluded to by Wordsworth: "In such a night, when every louder wind When thro' the gloom more venerable shows While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal, Something too high for syllables to speak; Till the free soul to a composedness charm'd, O'er all below a solemn quiet grown, Joys in th' inferior world, and thinks it like her own: Till morning breaks, and all's confus'd again; We find nothing comparable to what we have now quoted in any of the effusions of the Thirty Poetesses let us in courtesy so call them who flourished from the death of Lady Winchelsea to that of Charlotte Smith. True, that Lady Mary Wortley Montague is among the number, but her brilliant genius was not poetical, and shines in another sphere. Elizabeth Rowe, when Betsy Singer, was warmly admired by Prior, among whose poems is an "answer to Mrs Singer's pastoral on Love and Friendship." But though she says, finely we think, "There in a melting, solemn, dying strain, Let me all day upon my lyre complain, "Sweet age of blest delusion! blooming boys, Can find it center'd in the bounding ball! Views various fortune for each lovely child, Storms for the bold, and anguish for the mild; Beholds already those expressive eyes Beam a sad certainty of future sighs; And dreads each suffering those dear breasts may know Mary Barber was the wife of a shop- "Not this will lure me, for I'd have you know, This night to feast with Corydon I go ; Then beef and coleworts, beans and bacon too, And the plum-pudding of delicious hue, Sweet-spiced cakes, and apple-pies good store, Deck the brown board-and who can wish for more ?" The verse of Ann Yearsley, the milk. woman, we never tasted, but suspect it was thin and sour; and we cannot excuse her for having behaved so shamefully to Hannah More. Esther Chapone, as the world once knew, wrote Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, and Elizabeth Carter a translation of Epictetus, and they were ladies of the greatest learning and respectability; but the one's Ode to Solitude, and the other's Ode to Wisdom are really too much. Besides, they are as like as two peas. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the most beautiful of the beautiful, and richly endowed by nature with mental gifts, wrote lines-the Passage of the Mountain of St Gothard-admired—at least so he said in verse-by Coleridge. And poor Mary Robinson, with all her frailties, did not deserve to be strapped in her infirmity by that cruel cobbler. "Her poems," says Mr Dyce, "show that she possessed a good deal of fancy" which is more than Gifford did-and " a very pleasing facility of composition." But no Englishwoman ever wrote verses worthy of being twice read, who had deviated from virtue. Contemporaries of Charlotte Smith were Anna Seward, who possessed fine talents, and had she not been spoiled, would assuredly have excelled most of her sex in description of Nature and of passion; Anne Hunter, all whose verses are written with elegance and feeling, and whose "Death Song" is a noble strain, almost worthy of Campbell himself; Anne Barbauld, an honoured name, but in poetry only an imitator of exquisite skill; Amelia Opie, whose "Father and Daughter" will endure "till pity's self be dead," and of her songs and elegiac strains, some will outlive many compositions of the same kind now flourishing in fashionable life, while hers would seem to be forgotten; and our own Anne Grant, whose "Highlanders," though occasionally somewhat heavy, contains many pictures entirely true to Nature, and breathes of the heather. But her reputation rests on the wide and firm foundation of her prose, and she will for ever occupy a foremost place among our Scottish worthies. But Britain had as yet produced no great poetess, and she has produced but one-Joanna Baillie. Her Plays on the Passions were hailed at once all over the land as works of genius of the highest kind, while yet the poetry of Cowper, and Crabbe, and Burns had lost none of its freshness they were secure in their "pride of place" during the successive reigns of Scott and Byron-and now that her magnificent plan has been completed, the whole may be regarded with undiminished admiration even by those who can comprehend the grandeur of Wordsworth. It is somewhat strange that Scotland should have given birth but to a single poetess; nothing strange that of her should have been born the greatest of all poetesses, so we grudge not to England the glory of all the rest. Those of this age, alive or dead, transcend in worth those of all her other ages. Nay each of the PLANETARY FIVE is more lustrous than any of their Constella tions. We plan and promise but do not perform. The Series on those Luminaries is in our brain, but will not leave their pia mater. We know not well why it is so, but we often think together of Charlotte Smith, Mary Howitt, and Caroline Bowles. We are resolved to speak now of Caroline Bowles; nor shall the Monarch be suffered to leave the Roads without this sheet on board. And now we have been brought Our "smooth-sliding without step," or, as is our wont, on the wilfulness of wings (how unlike to walking or rather wading one's way through an article like an ordinary human being with splay-feet and flat-fish soles!) to the poem more immediately before us, from which we are not without hopes of being able erelong to bring ourselves to extract not a few pregnant passages for your delectation. hearts at no time cold-warmed towards our critical brethren, as we heard them all-all of any mark or likelihood- dailies, weeklies, and monthlies (the quarterlies are such laggards in love, that they generally arrive a year after the Fair) enthu siastic in their praise of this delightful volume. People with a crick in their neck, a flea in their ear, may abuse the brotherhood; but we are deservedly popular among the tolerably happy; and no other class of men, we have been credily informed, receive so many unlooked-for legacies as the editors of periodical works. In politics it is impossible to be too truculent. He who gives quarter is a fool, and is cut down by his prisoner. No war worth looking at, much less mingling in, but that in which we fight under the Bloody Flag. May the first Radical we meet on the field run us through the body, if we do not anticipate him; till then, we give him hearty greeting at the social board, and make no allusion to politics, except it be to laugh along with him at Lord Melbourne. But in literature we feel" that the blue sky bends over all;" and that all the nations of the earth are or ought to be at peace. All of us, after a hard fought day in political warfare, that is, all of us who are left alive, are glad to lay down our weapons, and join in celebration of the triumph of some bold son or bright daughter of song. How ele vating a sight to see us all crowding round the object of our common admiration, and emulously binding the brows of genius with victorious wreaths! And oh! what if they be woman's brows! Then with our admiration mingles love; and we know of a surety that while we are honouring genius, we are rewarding virtue. "The Birth-Day" is the autobiography of the childhood of Genius by Caroline Bowles. And by what is the childhood of genius distinguished from 66 "For she can give us back the dead, Even in the loveliest looks they wore." "Whose hair is thick with many a curl, That clusters round her head." the childhood of you or me, or any other good old man or woman? Read the Birth-Day, and perhaps you may We hope we have said sufficient to know. Yet we believe that there is ge- show that the subject of the Birth-Day nius in all childhood. But the creative is full of poetry; and depend upon it, joy that makes it great in its simplicity should you be disposed to deny it, dies a natural death or is killed, and that, in spite of the muscularity of there is an end of genius. In favoured your bodily frame, which may be of an spirits, neither few nor many, the joy unusual strength, you are in your seand the might survive; they are the cond childhood, which is all unlike Poets and the Poetesses of whom your first, on the authority of ShakAlexander Dyce and Christopher speare. Remember that Wordsworth North delight to show specimens has wisely said "the child is father of nor among them all is there a fairer the man;" and be assured that if spirit than Caroline Bowles. What a your heart leaps not up" when you memory she has! for you must know" behold a rainbow in the sky," you that unless it be accompanied with must be a monster of filial ingratitude. imagination, memory is cold and life- Be born again then; and though we less. The forms it brings before us do not insist on your changing your must be connected with beauty, that sex, be a boy worthy of dancing in a is, with affection or passion. All fairy ring hand-in-hand with pretty minds, even the dullest, remember the Caroline Bowles, days of their youth; but all cannot bring back the indescribable brightness of that blessed season. They who would know what they once were, must not merely recollect, but they must imagine, the hills and valleysif any such there were-in which their childhood played, the torrents, the waterfalls, the lakes, the heather, the rocks, the heaven's imperial dome, the raven floating only a little lower than the eagle in the sky. To imagine what he then heard and saw, he must imagine his own nature. He must collect from many vanished hours the power of his untamed heart, and he must, perhaps, transfuse also something of his maturer mind into these dreams of his former being, thus linking the past with the present by a continuous chain, which, though often invisible, is never broken. So is it too with the calmer affections that have grown within the shelter of a roof. We do not merely remember, we imagine our father's house, the fireside, all his features then most living, now dead and buried; the very manner of his smile, every tone of his voice. We must combine with all the passionate and plastic power of imagination the spirit of a thousand happy hours into one moment; and we must invest with all that we ever felt to be venerable such an image as alone can satisfy our filial hearts. It is thus that imagination, which first aided the growth of all our holiest and happiest affections, can preserve them to us unimpaired For a few years during "the innocent brightness of the new-born day," boys and girls, God bless them! are one and the same creatures-by degrees they grow, almost unsuspectingly, each into a different kind of living soul. Mr Elton, in his beautiful poem of Boyhood, has shown us Harry, and here Miss Bowles has shown us Carry, and now you may know, if you will, how in the educa tion of Nature Uprose both living flowers beneath your eyes." 'Tis a cheerful poem the BirthDay, and the heart of its producer often sings aloud for joy-yet 'tis a mournful poem too, and we can believe that her fair manuscript was now and then spotted with a tear. For have you not felt, when looking back on life, how its scenes and incidents, different as they may seem at the first glance of recognition, begin gradually to melt into each other, till they are indistinguishably blended in one pensive dream! In our happiest hours there may have been something in common with our most sorrowfulsome shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that, on retrospect, allies them with the sombre spirit of grief. And in like manner, in our unhappiest hours, there may have been gleams of gladness that in memory seem almost to give them the charac |